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This week  I zip up to Toronto to take part in a Canadian Music Week panel called 'Recommendation Engines: The ubersolution to Managing Music Ultra Surplus'.  They've put together a great set of panelists:

• Sandy Pearlman - Visiting Scholar, McGill University, Montreal, QC
• Michael McGuire - Research VP, Gartner G2 Media Group, San Jose, CA
• Tom Conrad - Chief Technology, Pandora Media Inc, Oakland
• Robert Gjerdingen - Professor, Northwestern, Evanston
• Paul Lamere - Principle Investigator, Sun Microsystems,
  

The only panelist that I've not met is Dr. Gjerdingen - but I am looking forward to meeting him.  He's the co-author of one of the most cited studies in the Music Information Retrieval academic community that looked at how well humans can classify music into music genres.  Just about every paper on machine classification of music cites this study.

 Here's the panel abstract:

New music discovery will be unlike anything any generation has ever experienced. As more music becomes available online and the long tail gets longer, recommendation engines with improved search filters are going to play a more important role in online commerce. With an aggregate of over one billion song versions now available somewhere online (according to Cache Logic), implementing recommendation engineering navigation for this functionally infinite database seems absolutely necessary. This panel features experts who'll bring you up to date on the latest discovery and recommendation news on what would otherwise prove an ungraspable chaos of music overload.

The panel is on Thursday at 2:40 in the Manitoba room of the  Royal York hotel in Toronto.  Be sure to stop by and say hello if you attend.